60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

158 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
here (‘Anti-Semitism’ and ‘Imperialism’), but also in the relationship,
posited in post-Arendtian scholarship, between genocidal contexts –
colonial, Nazi and postcolonial.
Arendt’s genealogy of ‘race’ is anything but linear and continuous. In
an earlier proposal for her Totalitarianism book (outlined in an article
published in the journal Commentary), Arendt put forward the idea
that anti-semitism, imperialism and racism found their convergence
in Nazism. However, the order of subsumption was subsequently reversed.
In a second version of her plan, she wanted to compile and
expand her previously published articles on anti-semitism, racism and
imperialism under the heading of ‘Imperialism’, concluding with an
additional chapter on Nazism as ‘Race Imperialism’ (the latter being
the proposed heading of the chapter that was to conclude the collection
of essays).
At the time, she understood Nazism as a successor to the European
colonial-imperialist enterprise (Tsao 2002: 581). In Part II, ‘Imperialism’,
she dealt with Nazism as inverted consummation of imperialism,
claiming that ‘African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil
for the fl owering of what later was to become the Nazi elite’ (Arendt
[1951] 1976: 206). But when she jotted down notes for Part III (‘Totalitarianism’),
she abandoned her view on Nazi ‘race imperialism’ (Tsao
2002: 581). 3 In contrast to her idea articulated earlier, the ‘Totalitarianism’
part of her book dissociates totalitarianism from ‘lust for power or
even the desire for a power-generating machine, [from] the game of
power for power’s sake which has been characteristic of the last stages of
imperialist rule’. In fact, she comes close to asserting that any similarities
between the means of imperialist and totalitarian politics are similarities
in appearance only (Arendt [1951] 1976: 407, 422).
This surprising fi nding should lead us to probe the much-cited idea
that European colonialism has provided models – governmental, political
and explanatory – for the Nazi genocide, as well as for the genocide
that is geopolitically labelled ‘Rwandan’. I would like to stay
with this idea for a while, in order then to critically interrogate it.
The ‘boomerang eff ect’ supposedly at work between European colonisation
and the Nazi genocide is commonly extended by analogy to
post-colonial contexts: a ‘boomerang eff ect’ (albeit one of a diff erent
kind), is likewise postulated for the relationship between colonial poli-
3 Some aspects of the view of Nazi “race imperialism” are retained in parts of the
‘Imperialism’ part, though (see Tsao 2002: 582, 583, 586).